Étiquette : Film heritage

6 June 2012 – The Austrian Film Museum has recently published its flagship online video project: « Kinonedelja – Online Edition ». 14 of the original 43 issues of the early Soviet newsreel series “Kinonedelja” (Kino-Week) survive in the Austrian Film Museum’s collection. The newsreels, which date from the years 1918 and 1919, are not merely significant for their depiction of life in the young Soviet Russia during the civil war, but also because they represent Dziga Vertov’s first contribution to cinema.

The films of Dziga Vertov have always played a key role in the collection, preservation and publication activities of the Austrian Film Museum since its foundation in the 1960s. It is therefore apt that his first films should also be the first films presented on the Film Museum’s website. The films are available to view in full length and full translations of the inter-titles are provided in both German and English.

4 June 2012 – With the entire film industry changing to digital, film archives need to be well prepared if they want to collect, preserve and show both analogue and digital formats. Based on the recommendations of the “ACE Position Paper on the Digital”, ACE is organising a series of 3 – 4 workshops for (higher) management staff of the ACE member archives to discuss strategies how these challenges can be met. The workshops are conceived as forums to discuss the intellectual and practical requirements which come along with digital archiving. The aim is to pool together competences and expertise already existing in the ACE member archives in such fields as archive technology and strategic planning (digitisation planning, training, funding, etc.).

The first workshop, which starts with a general outlook and focuses on the results of the Study “Challenges of the Digital Era for Film Heritage Institutions”, will be held during the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna on Thursday, 28 June 2012. Registration is open to management staff from the ACE member archives. For further information and to register, please see the draft programme.

The second workshop, dedicated to training in digital workflows and digital preservation, will take place at the Danish Film Institute later this year or early 2013. Further workshops will be scheduled and announced in due time.

4 May 2012 – The 5th edition of the Film Restoration Summer School / FIAF Summer School will take place in Bologna from June to July 2012. The project is organised and hosted by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with ACE and FIAF. The main objective of the Summer School is to teach and update participants on how to restore and preserve a film through the use of photochemical and new digital technologies. It is designed for both for archivists and staff working at FIAF archives, and students. For the Festival Edition 2012, ACE awarded a scholarship to five applicants.

Programme and timetable 2012On-line Distance Learning: 9 May- 20 June (on Wednesdays) Theory Classes: Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival, 23 – 30 June Restoration Practice: Bologna, 2 – 13 July During the internship, participants are supervised by international experts and laboratory staff to put into practice what they learned during their first week of theory.

Please find more information, the full programme and the list of the 36 selected participants here.

The final report of the Study on a Digital Agenda for European Film Heritage is available on-line. The Study was launched in January 2011 to assess the impact of digitisation for European film archives. It has been conducted by peacefulfish Productions Ltd, subcontractors were Red Cat Technologies, the University of Helsinki/IPR University Center and the external expert Nicola Mazzanti. Read the full report Executive summary available in en, fr, de More information on the DAEFH study

20 September 2011 – From 27 to 29 September, the Conference « Importing Asta Nielsen. Cinema-Going and the Making of the Star System in the Early 1910s » will take place at the Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt. Asta Nielsen has been the first female star who received international reputation. Her name is inextricably linked to the advent of the long feature film and the invention of the star system. During the 3-day conference, film historians and researchers will discuss the various modes of distribution, exhibition, appropriation and reception of Asta Nielsen within countries of all continents.

27 July 2011 – After nearly three years of preparation and development, the European Film Gateway – EFG is now online. The portal to the digital collections of European film archives and cinémathèques offers free access to currently about 400,000 digital videos, photos, film posters and text materials. By September, the number of digital items will increase to 600,000 from 16 film archives.

« The European Film Gateway creates a central online access to Europe’s film heritage for the first time. Previously, this remarkable record of 20th century European cinema had been dispersed on different national platforms, » says Claudia Dillmann, director of the Deutsches Filminstitut, which co-ordinates the project. « Now the films and information about them are more accessible, not only to scholars, journalists and creatives, but also by a broader audience interested in film. »

« EFG also provides access to material in film archives that was hitherto hardly known, and some is now online for the first time, » says project manager Georg Eckes. These include unique magic lantern slide collections from France, erotic films made in Austria in the early 20th century, advertising films from Norway, newsreels from Lithuania and a comprehensive film poster collection from Denmark. Hidden treasures can be discovered from 15 European countries. Cinecittá Luce from Rome, for example, contributes not only a famous Italian newsreel collection reporting on important film-related events and persons, but also a fine collection of early films by great masters like Rossellini, Antonioni, Comencini, and other famous names of Italian filmmaking. An extensive collection of set photos to films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder contributed by the Deutsches Filminstitut will be available for the first time online from August on.

Users of the portal can search for people, for example Marlene Dietrich, but also by film title or keywords. They get an overview of related digital objects from the film archives which can be viewed directly in the portal. The portal always links back to the website of the relevant archives, and therefore also works as a search engine for selected digital holdings of European film archives.

EFG is a component of Europeana, the platform for the cultural heritage of Europe. EFG gathers the indexing and access information, so-called « metadata », and provides it to Europeana in a structured form. By doing so, the European Film Gateway and Europeana bring together the collections of European film archives with holdings of libraries, archives and museums in Europe, and put them in a transnational and multicultural context.

The EFG portal is the result of the EFG project which was developed by the Deutsches Filminstitut together with the Association des Européennes Cinémathèques and its members. It started in September 2008 and will end in September 2011. The coordination of the project lies with the Deutsches Filminstitut in Frankfurt am Main. It will operate the site on behalf of the project partners even after the project period has ended. The technological infrastructure was provided by the IT research institute of the Italian national research council, CNR-ISTI in Pisa. The project was funded by the eContentplus Programme of the European Commission.

8 June 2011 – More than 10,000 titles of dossiers relating to films, personalities and other categories can now be researched online. Within the next years, this number will increase to over 50,000 dossiers. The database allows he materials themselves cannot be displayed or downloaded. Detailed information about the content of each individual dossier can be obtained by an online request. The « results list » represents the materials held by the Museum, which can then be viewed on-site with requests made in advance.

Acquisition of film-related materials and documents by the Film Museum dates back to the founding of the institution in 1964.

The collection contains materials and documents produced throughout the process of making movies, such as treatments, scripts, promotional materials, press kits, screening invitations, advertisements, reviews, distribution catalogs, magazines, newspaper articles and clippings, as well as unbound documents which may contain brief film descriptions or production-related information. These documents include filmmaker bios and filmographies, interviews, obituaries, and correspondence including letters, postcards and greeting cards. Another aspect of the collection is focused on film festivals, exhibitions and retrospectives, as well as technical developments in cinema and film projection, represented through materials such as program notes, exhibition catalogs, brochures and manuals.

These materials are stored in acid-free paper envelopes (numbered consecutively) in files separated into categories: Film, Personalities, Institutions, Companies, Film Festivals, Exhibitions/Retrospectives, and Technical. The file titles and groups are searchable via the database. Screenplays, along with festival and rental catalogs are stored separately.

It is the Museum’s policy to make as many materials as possible available to students as well as scholars. Open and « barrier-free » access to the collections via online search helps create transparency as well as a connection to both academics and researchers.

27 May 2011 – On 24 May 2011, the European Commission adopted a Proposal for a Directive on certain permitted uses of orphan works with a view to establishing common rules on the digitisation and online display of so-called orphan works. Orphan works are works like books, published articles and films that are still protected by copyright but whose authors are not known or cannot be located or contacted to obtain copyright permissions.

According to a study ACE carried out among its member archives in 2009, about 21% of the films held in Europe’s film archives and cinematheques are estimated to be orphan works. But with no common rules available to make the digitisation and online display of orphan works legally possible, they are doomed to remain untouched and therefore inaccessible. In order to proceed with large-scale digitisation projects such as the Europeana portal, common guidelines on how to deal with such works are necessary.

The Proposal forsees a new EU law providing lawful, cross-border online access to orphan works. Libraries, museums and archives in the EU country where a work was first published would be required to conduct a thorough search to find the copyright holder before creating a digital version. If the rightholder cannot be identified or located, the work would be identified as an « orphan » and that status would apply throughout the EU so that the work could be made available online without prior authorisation until the owner is identified and found.

26 May 2011 –The Desmet Collection at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands has been inscribed on the UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, a list of documentary heritage including books, archival records, and film and sound recordings that are of exceptional significance for the world. This was announced yesterday by the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, in Paris. The entire collection will become part of the prestigious UNESCO programme that assists countries in safeguarding and sharing documentary heritage. The Jean Desmet Collection includes many films from the early years of cinema that were once presumed lost. Beside its relevance to film history, the collection forms an equally important cultural and corporate archive. Film pioneer Jean Desmet was the first major distributor and cinema owner in the Netherlands.

The collection of Jean Desmet (1875-1956) has been held by EYE Film Institute Netherlands (formerly the Filmmuseum) since 1957. The vast collection contains, among many other items, masterpieces by D.W. Griffith and Louis Feuillade, films with Asta Nielsen and Lyda Borelli, and productions from the film companies Pathé, Gaumont and Edison. A large number of the films in the collection from the Netherlands’ first professional distributor are unique copies (the only preserved copy in the world).

In most countries, three-quarters of the films produced during the silent film era have been lost. Because Desmet kept almost everything – even the bills from the window washer were archived – EYE now has a collection of (primarily non-Dutch) films that were often no longer available in their countries of origin. When these films were restored and screened at festivals abroad in the 1980s, they caused a revolution in the international film history world. Many of these films had previously been presumed lost.

About the collectionThe donation from the Desmet heirs in 1957 forms an important base for the current collection of silent films at EYE. It’s the particular combination of films, posters, photographs and business archives that makes the Desmet Collection so valuable, providing an incredible insight into the early years of cinema. As a distributor, Desmet focused on financial gains; film wasn’t yet seen as an art form. The significance of this substantial collection lies thus in the combination of all the films, big and small, that defined the daily programming of the cinemas. The films and paper documents Desmet preserved reveal much about supply and demand at the time, and tell the history of what was then a very popular, new form of entertainment.

The collection includes 933 films, nearly all of which originate from the period between 1907 and 1916. Most of the films are ‘one-reelers’, with a running time of about 10 minutes, and a large number of these films are unique. The collection additionally includes circa 2,000 posters and nearly 700 photographs. It is unparalleled worldwide as a cultural and social-historical document due to both its size and its contents.

20 February 2011 – As of 10 February 2011, more than 300 archival films are available online for free at filmarkivet.se, a joint project between the Swedish Film Institute and the National Library of Sweden. The majority of the films originates from the Swedish Film Institute’s Archival Film Collections; mainly shorts, non-fiction films, newsreels and commercials – films that reflect the transformation of Swedish society over the last century.

The selection of films is being done by an editorial board with representatives from both institutions. Many of the films selected are virtually unknown but the locations, events and people depicted in them are very familiar. Each film is presented with a short synopsis and production credits. Many also contain longer texts to put the films into context.

Besides an English project description, filmarkivet.se is available in Swedish only.